Dave Eggers: You Shall Know Our Velocity

I tried to nap, but now my head was alive, was a toddler in a room full of new guests. It jumped and squealed and threw the books off the shelves. Yes I'm one of the slowest talkers you'll ever meet but my head, when I have it and it's not asleep or being borrowed, is not slow. My mind, I know, I can prove, hovers on hummingbird wings. It hovers and it churns. And when it's operating at full thrust, the churning does not stop. The machines do not rest, the systems rarely cool. And while I can forget anything of any importance – this is why people tell me secrets – my mind has an uncanny knack for organization when it comes to pain. Nothing tormenting is lost, never even diminished in color or intensity or quality of sound. These were filed near the front.

Imagine a desk. The desk is located at the top of a green hill, about two hundred feet above a soft meadow dotted with tulips and something like cotton. Winding through the meadow is a stream, narrow and quick, which rushes with the sound of shushing and sniffing. The desk has a magnificent view, and the air around the desk and on the meadow is about seventy-two degrees. It's balmy and bright, and the sky is blue but not too blue, and in all it would seem to be the perfect place to have a desk. A desk where you could observe things and do the work that had to be done. The one catch is that the desk sits above a large structure, the entrance to which is just behind and below the desk. This building extends ten stories, down. The structure has been dug down into the whole of the hill and houses a large staff of humanoid people, oily and pale and without hair – they are moles and look like it, with huge square yellow teeth and mouths of fire – all of whom are in charge of keeping track of and retrieving its contents, a mixture of records, dossiers, quotations, historical documents, timelines, fragments, cultural studies – the most glorious and banal and bloody memories.

Let's say that I like having this structure in existence, and that I value its presence, and that I have easy access to it. If I want something, a file on something, all I need to do is summon it and one of the library's staffers, who again are all hairless, have ruby-colored eyes and wear white, will bring it to me, usually without any delay. If I'm on the phone with Hand, and he mentions the time we pushed Darren Larson over the sprinkler – we were big kids and bullies – and Darren Larson cut the shit out of his shin, all that milky white showing, and then he hid behind the fence by the lake under the sunsetting sky, mewling – then I can ask the librarian to get me all the information possible on that event, and do it quickly, so I can converse intelligently with Hand. Seconds later an eager staff member, ruby-eyed hairless and in white and with the smell of sulfur barely covered with rancid perfume, is before me, with a neat manila folder containing all the data stored within the library about that day, given that there's been, over the years, some mismanagement of the library and any number of floods and fires – so much lost but who to blame?

And as much as I value the efficiency and professional élan of the library staff, I'd begun recently to worry about a new wrinkle in their procedures. For the most part, they're supposed to act on my requests when I make requests, and to otherwise just keep an orderly file system. Part of the deal, implicitly, is that at no time should the staff members of the library choose for me what information I should be given. But lately I'd be sitting at my desk, trying either to work or to just admire the view and wonder about the stream, what makes it go, if there are fish inside, what their names might be, if any of them are secretly talking fish and if so what they might say – when there will suddenly be a library staff member at my side, and she will have one hand on my back, and the other will be pointing to the contents of a file she's brought me and has opened on my desk, so that I will follow her finger to where she's pointing, and when I see what she's pointing to I will gasp.

I never want to see that fucking clipping again. I was outraged at my mom for keeping it. What kind of psycho would do that? She didn't show it to me but there it was, in the drawer where we kept the scissors and envelopes and clippings. From the local paper, a picture of the car, crushed, under the headline: YOUNG MAN DIES WHEN SEMI SPEEDS OVER CAR. I never thought I'd see a picture. I didn't know there was a picture. It had been three months and I was sleeping normally again and was visiting Mom in Memphis and found the clipping. I read the article, folded lengthwise and ripped, not cut, at first not even knowing it was Jack. For a few paragraphs it was just a chilling and pathetic story – some poor man had been killed when he'd been driving too slow. A truck traveling too fast had overcome the man's car, had driven over it, crushing it in a fraction of a second. The picture was clear, the car right there, fender to fender, but yet it was only an abstraction of a car, an angry scribble of a car, and when the clipping was unfolded there was Jack, his high school graduation picture, sportcoat over his right shoulder, the picture right next to the trucker's, like they were a team, like the quarterback who won the game and the receiver who caught the pass.

"I just thought," the librarian will say in a curt, professional way, "that you should see this."

I know this file, but I have no need to see it now. I didn't ask for this goddamn file. I tell her this.

"Yes," she says, "but I really thought you should see this again. We felt it was important for you to pore over the file right now, replaying the episode in your mind for the next few hours."

I look at the file, and its contents scream at me in a voice containing thousands of murders in unclean homes. I push it back toward the staffer.

"I looked at it. Thank you."

She leaves. I look out at the meadow and see a scattering of birds chasing each other. I can see for maybe thirty miles.

There's another tug at my sleeve. It's another staff member, a young man with eyes like animals on fire. He's leaning over the desk and he has a file. It's the same file the previous librarian had.

"I just looked at that," I say.

"Yes, but the feeling downstairs is that you haven't examined it closely enough. Especially the part with Nigel, the prick from the funeral home, and all Jack's college friends laughing and smoking out on the deck on the day of the service."

I picture what I'd say to those imbeciles if I saw them again. I wanted to act and wanted something that would cause them pain and embarrassment but wanted it to happen quietly. Everything quietly. My tolerance for anything loud had diminished every year I'd lived, and now so many things gave me a jump. The steady noise at work, drills and saws – I couldn't do it anymore, this noise. Before I quit I'd begun to ask for the quieter tasks. Painting walls and moldings, installing doors, though I maintained an option for the tearing down of ceilings – usually the acoustic tile of officed areas – and the digging up of floors. I loved doing both. So many good wood floors covered by layers and layers of indefensible surfaces – fake linoleum, particle board, rubber, carpet, cement, anything. I loved to pry under these things to find the original floor, the floor of parallel and interlocking tongue-in-groove fir planks, to uncover them, run my rough palms over their soft wood and sand them, and finish them again – to start over with this original smooth floor. And the ceilings were just as satisfying, slipping those hideous tiles, dotted like starry skies inverted, from their grids, dropping them to the floor, watching them break. Then the tearing down of the grids – so easy! – that held the tiles overhead, revealing a ceiling many feet higher, huge wooden beams old and full of the lines and curves of growth and struggle. I loved the effect when both happened in the same space: the raising of a ceiling, the lowering of a floor, exposing the wood again above and below, the space growing, the usable space and air attendant swelling within immovable walls. I thought of that painting in my boss's office, on a calendar his daughter had given him, a Callibotte, men bent over a wood floor, the sun whitening them, the men in that one painting bent over, kneeling and sanding the whitened wood floors in that second-story room in what must be Paris -